There are many kinds of multi-tined forks in common use that are used to pick up and transfer a variety of things from one location to another. Such forks range in size from relatively small ones used by individuals for dining, larger ones used to manipulate and serve relatively heavy pieces of food, even larger ones for agricultural applications, and the largest for industrial operations.
Dining forks of the kind found in durable cutlery sets are typically made of metal, and can be quite expensive. Cheaper disposable dining forks, sometimes individually wrapped, are typically made of molded plastics materials. Both kinds have an ergonomically designed elongate handle attached to a head typically comprising three to five closely spaced, generally parallel, often mildly curved, smooth-surfaced, forwardly aligned, frequently tapered, tines that have somewhat rounded points at their distal ends.
A person using such a conventional dining fork usually pushes one or more of the tine points into food, e.g., a piece of meat, egg, fruit or vegetable, to physically engage it with one or more tines and then carry the food to his or her mouth to eat it. If the food is not adequately engaged with the tine(s) it may fall off during the transfer—resulting in discomfort to the diner and embarrassment all around. If the food being eaten with the fork is soft and slippery, e.g., cling peaches in heavy syrup or a piece of soft wet meat from a stew, the user may find it most convenient to scoop up and carry the food resting on top of the tines. But this might violate the dictates of etiquette, is not always easy for young children or the elderly to manage, and might still lead to the food being dropped on its way to the user's mouth. The same may happen to an adult trying to feed almost any kind of food to a young child or an invalid with a conventional dining fork.
There are disposable implements, which are sometimes called “sporks”, that combine the structural attributes of a conventional fork and a conventional spoon in the form of three-dimensionally curved concave tines cut into the bowl to ease the task of engaging and carrying the food. However, because the typical spork is made of very smooth and slippery plastics material the problem at issue basically remains unsolved.
There is, therefore, a need for an improved dining fork that enables an adult with less than ideal dexterity, hand-eye coordination and steadiness—and even a child—to easily engage and securely carry with the improved fork small, soft or slippery elements of food to eat the same.
Larger multi-tined food-serving forks, of the type typically used to handle and serve cooked juicy meat being sliced off from a roasted pig, turkey, beef or the like, also pose the same challenge: ensuring that a piece of food being transferred by a user does not fall off the tines of the fork unintentionally. Such forks also can bear similar improvement to perform better.
Likewise, users of even larger tined forks—as are used in agriculture and industry—may encounter the same basic problem, i.e., the need to avoid unintended slippage of a load from a fork transferring the same. On occasion, multi-tined pitchforks are used to manually transfer wet and/or slippery materials like wet grass, rotting leaves, and the like on farms and in gardens. Similarly, larger multi-tined forks are used on loaders to lift and move around large and heavy bales of straw or hay that may have sat in the open for long periods of time and might therefore have decomposed, be wet, and are slippery. Other multi-tined implements are employed in meat-processing facilities to manipulate animal carcasses. Most such “forks” typically have a plurality of long, smoothly surfaced, diversely pointed, sometimes gently curved, metal tines disposed generally parallel to each other. It is important in using any of these forks to guard against problems and danger to personnel that could arise from unintended separation of the object or material from the fork during its use. A simple and inexpensive improvement to such forks to minimize the above-discussed foreseeable problems is therefore also highly desirable.
The present invention meets this need with a very simple and inexpensive solution that is considered highly adaptable for use a variety of applications.